A domain-protocol mapping based middleware for distributed application development

Abstract

Distributed systems such as Internet of Things, Sensor Networks and Networked Control Systems are being used in various application domains, including industrial, environmental, medical and energy management domains. A distributed application in these domains may need to access data from different devices, where they may all be of the same type or a combination of different types. In addition, these devices may communicate through standardized protocols or proprietary interfaces. The development of such a distributed application may also require a team of developers with expertise in different disciplines. Therefore, the application development that involves heterogeneous devices and multidisciplinary teams can be made more effective by introducing an interface layer that shields developers from aspects of software and hardware heterogeneity. This work proposes a 'domain-protocol mapping' technique that is implemented as a middleware framework. The proposed mapping method maps the application data schema represented as object-oriented domain object to the appropriate communication protocol packet data and also updates the domain object from the response packet data. The middleware provides APIs for the domain experts to read the data from the device or to write the data to the device. The marshalling and unmarshalling process of the domain objects are hidden from the domain expert who may or may not be a software engineer. The use of the developed middleware is illustrated in two case-studies, one involving a simulation of distributed network controls for power system and the other involving integration of different types of power meters in power monitoring application.